Interview with Tony Abou-Ganim, Author of 'Vodka Distilled'

“I went into a certain bar that I was hearing a lot about, and I said, ‘What vodkas do you have?’” says
Tony Abou-Ganim, “And the barman said, ‘We have two–and in my opinion that’s two too many.’”

For Abou-Ganim, this sort of response was not uncommon: In the world of spirits, vodka may be popular–the most widely consumed spirit in the world–but it’s hardly respected by craft bartenders.

That attitude drove Abou-Ganim, a long time leader of the craft-cocktail movement, to dedicate over a year of his life writing a book about nothing but vodka.

“If we accomplished one thing,” says Abou-Ganim of Vodka Distilled (co-written by
Mary Elizabeth Falkner), “it’s to do away with the myth that all vodkas are the same. It is as great a category as any spirit.” The master mixologist, who created Bellagio Las Vegas‘s original cocktail program, and now consults worldwide, can rightly be credited as a pioneer in many bar trends. So when he dedicates this much energy to reappreciating vodka, expect a lot of bartenders to listen–including the unnamed one above.

You review 58 vodkas in the book, including some very uncommon labels and omitting some very popular ones. How did you arrive at that number?Tony Abou-Ganim: I started off with just under 110 vodkas. I intentionally didn’t want to rate them. If I featured them in the book, that in itself is a statement of their quality. I wanted to represent the categories by raw materials. The nuances in vodkas, if you had to boil it down to one element, would be the raw material and how the distiller maintains the characters of that. I think we’ve gotten away from that overdistilled, overfiltered style of vodka that is very neutral, to leaving in more of the character of the spirit. Chopin has recently launched specific potato vodkas, and doing 100 percent rye, 100 percent wheat varietals.

Vodka can be made with specific wheats, or in the case of XO from France, five different kind of wheat. I didn’t want to review them just myself either, so I brought in three other palates I respected:
Bridget Albert,
Dale DeGroff, and
Steve Olson.

Vodka labels often mention how many times something has been distilled, or what it’s filtered through, from activated charcoal and coconut shells to even gold and platinum. Did you discover any hard-and-fast rules in terms of these factors, regional source, or base ingredients?TAG: I wouldn’t say there was any hard rule. I was looking for it. I tasted a U.S. potato vodka blind and thought that it was from Poland for sure! Potato vodkas probably have the most diverse range of all. And that’s one of the points that I wanted to make, to enjoy each vodka neat for its subtle nuances. Once you master vodka, everything else is so much easier.

If someone wants to do a vodka tasting at home, you have good guidelines in the book, but what would you say is absolutely necessary to get good results?TAG: It needs to be done blind. You need to have the proper glassware, something stemmed, with a small bowl that catches the aromas. Have a lot of food and water on hand. It’s about having fun.

How do you approach pairing vodkas with foods, if such a thing is possible?TAG: I write extensively about pairing it with caviars in the book, even domestic ones like lumpfish and paddlefish that won’t put you in the poorhouse. If you look at Eastern Europe as a map, smoked fish is great, dried meats, pickles. My personal favorite is a toast with foie gras and a little sea salt, paired with some ice-cold rye vodka. I’m getting excited just thinking about it.

Vodka has traditionally been made with potatoes, wheat, and rye. But it can actually be made from nearly any plant or fruit, and several are now made with corn. What’s the difference between corn vodka and what most people would call moonshine?TAG: It’s the same difference between grappa and a grape-based vodka like Ciroc. Basically you’re taking something and distilling it to 192 proof. When you taste a moonshine, you get a lot more corn [flavor], because it’s not as refined–so [the answer is in] distillation, rectification, and the filtration. But Ole Smokey makes a moonshine that is so neutral that it is virtually a vodka in character.

What’s your opinion of flavored vodkas? They are conspicuously absent from Vodka Distilled.TAG: How flavoring of vodka really started [historically] was because the distillates were so harsh. Today, there are some wonderful flavored vodkas, but I think the industry has done a huge disservice bombarding us with every flavor from our childhood and calling it vodka.

Is that why so many mixologists hate vodka, is it just a snobbery thing?TAG: Young bartenders, they go back and look at the Golden Age of cocktails, prior to Prohibition, and find no mention of vodka. If vodka was available in Jerry Thomas‘s day, I wonder if he would’ve worked with it. It was known in Eastern Europe, but not for cocktails, rather to be enjoyed by its own. You start to see it pop up in the U.S. when the Bloody Mary and the Moscow Mule are introduced.

Heublein seems to have been a key player in establishing vodka’s appeal in the U.S. in the 1950s, with the Moscow Mule. Was the drink’s creation really a happy accident?TAG: I did a lot of research into that, and I read that the bartender at the Cock ‘n Bull in Hollywood mixed the vodka and ginger beer together to get rid of bottles that nobody was drinking. I did the same kind of thing when I created the Sunsplash. In both cases, people just wanted something easy and fun and light, I think.